403 Forbidden

NEW BRUNSWICK — While emergency room doctors at Raritan Bay Medical Center were feverishly trying to stabilize an Old Bridge man who had been severely beaten, township police were questioning a possible suspect in the assault.

Patrolman Timothy Snee told a jury in New Brunswick today that Aashish Sinha, then 16, identified Julian Daley as one of four teens who attacked his father, Divendyu, his 12-year-old brother, Ravi and him on Fela Drive in Old Bridge about 11:30 p.m. on June 25, 2010, as they and their mother, Alka, were out for a walk. Aashish Sinha said he and Daley went to the same school and that he lived in the area, the officer said.

Snee said he went to Daley’s home shortly after midnight on June 26, and that Daley answered the door.

"I asked him what happened tonight," Snee told the jury. "He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said he was at Wendy’s (on Route 516 in Old Bridge) with his friends, including the driver, a Hispanic kid named Steve."

Snee said he didn’t tell Daley about the attack on Divendyu Sinha, but asked to talk to Daley’s parents. He said he told the parents their son had been identified as one of the teens who attacked Sinha and that he was facing serious charges, depending on the man’s condition.

Snee’s was on the witness stand during the second day of testimony at the trial of 19-year-old Steven Contreras for Divenduy Sinha’s murder. The 49-year-old computer scientist died June 28 at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick from a massive cerebral hemorrhage caused by blows to the head.

Contreras, Daley, Cash Johnson, Christian Tinli, and Christopher Conway, were all juveniles at the time of the assault, but are being tried as adults. Contreras is being tried separately because he implicated the others in his statement to police. The others will be tried later.

They are charged with murder, three counts of aggravated assault, conspiracy to commit aggravated assault, conspiracy to commit riot, criminal mischief and two counts of hindering apprehension. The charges include one for assaulting a motorist several minutes before the attack on Sinha and for damaging the car the man was driving. The victim of the first attack escaped and the teens drove on until they spotted the Sinha family, authorities said.

Authorities say Contreras was an accomplice to Sinha’s murder because he drove the other four around looking for people to attack.

Also testifying today was Casey Raymond, a friend of the five teens. Raymond told jurors that she and her girlfriends were partying with the five behind the Virgil Grissom Elementary School on Bushnell Road earlier in the evening of the two attacks.

She said she overheard Tinli and Johnson talking "about fighting someone." Tinli, she said, said he was looking to "(blank) someone up" that night.

Raymond said they all went to Wendy’s to get something to eat and, at some point, the five boys, with Contreras driving, left.

She said she received a phone call from a friend after she got home about 11:45 p.m. that another friend’s car had been damaged about a half-hour earlier in an attack by several teenagers.

Raymond said she learned from the car’s owner that Daley was identified as being involved in that attack on the car and its driver shortly after the group left Wendy’s.

Raymond said she texted Daley, asking him, "what happened?" but he never responded.